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30th June 2017

A couple of months back I found loads of old notes about all the old Epic Space Marine games we played, starting from back when I was in high school. I thought it would be a good idea to type them all up as best I could, and upload them all. While I was at it, I also converted the Epic-S and 40K battle reports from their PDF state to HTML, and they can be found on the Warhammer 40K page.

16th May 2017

25th April 2017

Opened up a new section all for including stuff about the board game Super Dungeon Explore. There's not much in there yet until my own rules are finished, but hopefully will get some content in there soon.

Latest Blog Entry

Computer Games Blog

This is where you can read any of my irregular wafflings about computer gaming. The whole point of this blog is to help motivate me to properly finish games, whether they be recent ones or older ones I played when I was younger that I never managed to beat.

29th October 2015 - More Darkness

In the last couple of weeks I've finally been motivated to work through Assault On Dark Athena after finishing Butcher Bay a while back. It was mostly much of the same, but I found some of the later sections very frustrating and difficult. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally over.

My main issue was with how the fighting style changed as the game progressed. In the early sections, it was all about sneaking up on people and taking them out, or stunning them with the tranquilizer and moving in for the quiet kill. Later on in the game, sneaking became pretty much impossible, as the enemies always seemed to know where I was. With the added loss of the tranq-gun about half way through, the game pretty much became an FPS, where the enemies had more accurate and stronger weapons than I did. It sucked.

Some of the bosses were also a pain in the ass. Pretty much all the later bosses demanded I use a weird mine-shooting gun called the SCAR gun. That thing loaded so slowly that just one miss could totally screw me, and regularly did. The last boss in particular was the worst, as you need to use the mines to knock her down an elevator shaft. Sometimes the mines would knock her over, sometimes they would knock her back, and most of the time they would do nothing at all. It took me ages to knock her back enough times to get her over the edge. What a ball-ache.

There were a few bugs here and there, but I don't think as many as the first game. The one that really pissed me off was when all the Nanomed cartridges I had saved up just went missing from my inventory for no reason, meaning I couldn't heal up. Fucking game.

But it's done, and that's a good thing. I was hoping it would set up Pitch Black, but it gave absolutely no clue as to how Johns captures Riddick leading into that film. Oh well.

The Dark Athena spotted

Game tries early to make me care for a little kid, but that shit don't work on me

Yeah I can see you, you dirty bastard

Automan, is that you?

This dude's got problems

Behold, the magical floating gun's big brother

This drone looks like it needs a hug

Game never explains why the Athena is bombarding this planet

Still don't get how she survives me stabbing her through the neck

Got the drop on these fools

Ooh, she mad

Get outta here, biatch

Before tackling Riddick's second adventure, I had originally intended to complete a game from a Humble Bundle I bought ages ago, as it was about time I had a go at some of those games. I chose Psychonauts, as though it's an old game, it seems to be held in high regard, and looked worthy of a play through.

I was wrong.

It's been a while since I've played a game that got me that frustrated and wondering why I was wasting my time playing it, but this one managed it very quickly.

Without a doubt, the most annoying thing was the very limited camera controls. I even switched from controller to mouse and keyboard trying to find the best way to play it, but that only made it fractionally better. Most of the time, there was hardly any vertical movement available on the camera, so I couldn't look up or down more than a few degrees. For a platformer, this was stupid. Then at other times, the camera was completely locked, especially during boss fights for some reason. Give me control damn it!
Didn't help that there was no compensation on the camera when it came to the environment, so things like rocks and trees would constantly block my view as well.

I found the controls a bit awkward also, but I think this was mostly linked to my camera issues. It only got worse when using the psychic power "levitate", as my character pretty much had a mind of his own at that point.

The last straw came when I reached a level that flat out told me I could go no further without levelling up first. There was no way I was going to go back through the old levels to grind out levels and get new skills, so I decided to immediately uninstall the game. What a piece of shit.

I'm still not sure what the story was about, and I guess I never will. It was something about this kid wanting to become a "Psychonaut", kind of like a psychic crime fighter or something. There was some bad shit going down at the training camp he is attending, and he had to figure out what. That's about it.

I really did try and finish it, but holy shit the game was so frustrating I just couldn't drag myself through it.

This annoying kid is the main character

What the hell is going in inside my brain?

Punching some psychic manifestations

This fight's not going too well

This woman was inappropriately creepy, and should be on a register of some kind I think